On Wed, 2009-04-08 at 16:22 +0200, Giacomo A. Catenazzi wrote:
> Nenolod: sorry for the other mail.
>
> William Pitcock wrote:
> > On Tue, 2009-04-07 at 13:06 -0300, Otavio Salvador wrote:
> >> On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 9:21 PM, William Pitcock
> >> <nenolod@sacredspiral.co.uk> wrote:
> >>> Lilo upstream is dead (no release in quite a while), but the lilo
> >>> maintainer has also been seen as saying in various mailing lists etc,
> >>> that since Debian patches lilo that he has no interest in helping to fix
> >>> problems in our version.
> >> Ok but you could try to push those patches upstream. This is how
> >> grub has been improved and also parted. This works most of time.
> >>
> >> This way we "reduce" the amount of patches we keep in Debian
> >> and also you could try to get in touch with other distros to share
> >> the load and avoid reworking at same things.
> >
> > lilo is officially unmaintained now. The canonical website of lilo now
> > points to a 404 error page, see http://lilo.go.dyndns.org/ .
>
> as grub was not really maintained. Also grub2 doesn't seems so fast in
> development.
> I think these kind of project have difficult to maintain motivated
> maintainer.
>
> What do the other distributions?
I've seen a few smaller distributions looking into extlinux as an
alternative to lilo. Not sure what the redhat/fedora/centos/etc camp are
doing though.
>
> extlinux seems the real alternative: the maintainer is active
> in kernel boot since a lot of years, he has a good knowledge
> of lilo (thus is not the usual: do a new project because I
> cannot read/understand the old code).
>
> OTOH hpa test always the boot changes in kernel, and
> lilo is always tested, so in this regards, he take also
> care about lilo.
>
>
> I think we need a discussion of the fate of lilo at DebConf.
> I volunteer to check and give you technical details of the
> main boot loaders for i386/amd64 architecture, so that
> we can decide better (and give inputs to upstream on what
> they miss). Any interest in such talk?
It would be a good topic for discussion if I can make it to DebConf this
year (which is probable, just a matter of getting a good deal on plane
tickets).
>
>
> BTW: my new laptop was saved by lilo ;-)
One of my newer servers was also saved by lilo (fucking adaptec SAS
controllers...). However, the current health of lilo is still something
to be concerned about.
> I installed grub (and Debian). Trying the Windows hidden partition
> (to install windows), grub stopped working (it was rescue mode, but
> without capability to rescue something). Also rescue disk +
> reconfiguring + update-grub did nothing.
> Installing lilo gave me a know boot environment, and it worked at
> first try. So: lilo should live!
That's because grub does a number of things incorrectly as well. I don't
think extlinux repeats those mistakes though, at least from what I have
seen in production.
William

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